Kogutowicz’s Globes in the Virtual Globes Museum, Budapest

Abstract

The recently opened Virtual Globes Museum (http://vgm.elte.hu), founded by the author at the Department of Cartography and Geoinformatics, Eötvös Loránd University, publishes threedimensional virtual models of old globes on the Internet. The main purpose of the museum is to preserve these artefacts of old cartographers and at the same time to make them available for anyone who wants to study their content all over the World. In the Virtual Globes Museum project several globes are shown in their current, real state. There is a searchable background database containing detailed datasheets for each globe. The models are fully interactive: visitors can spin the globes around, zoom in and out. Manó Kogutowicz was one of the founders of modern cartography and map publishing in Hungary. He died just 100 years ago, on 22 December 1908 at the age of 57. He had a short, but varied and rich life. György Kisari Balla, researcher of his life, has made a catalogue of his 542 publications (maps, atlases, globes) made between 1884 and 1908, which included six globes. Unfortunately, five of them could not be found by the author of this paper even after searching in the major globe collections. However, several map prints of globes not listed in the catalogue were found. By now these maps have been processed and published in the Virtual Globes Museum. In this way there are already two globes of 51 cm and four of 25.5 cm diameter in the VGMOne of the 51 cm diameter globes was found at the Cholnoky Collection in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) with the help of Zsombor Bartos-Elekes, the lecturer of Babeş–Bolyai University, Faculty of Geography. Now this is the only known printed sheet of globe segments which was made by Kogutowicz in 1896